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Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum (Theoretical Minimum 2) Kindle Edition

by Leonard Susskind (Author), Art Friedman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Part of: The Theoretical Minimum (5 books)

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'Quantum mechanics for real. This is the good stuff, the most mysterious aspects of how reality works, set out with crystalline clarity. The place to start' Sean Carroll, physicist, California Institute of Technology, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe

This is the ultimate practical introduction to quantum mechanics. World-renowned physicist Leonard Susskind and data engineer Art Friedman give you the basic skills you need to tackle this famously difficult topic yourself.

They provide clear, lively explanations of basic concepts, introduce the key fields of quantum mechanics and include step-by-step exercises. Making a complex subject 'as simple as possible, but no simpler', this is a practical toolkit for amateur scientists that you won't find anywhere else.

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The Theoretical Minimum
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386 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
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Penguin
Publication date

25 February 2014
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7893 KB
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States and measurements are two different things, and the relationship between them is subtle and nonintuitive.
Highlighted by 229 Kindle readers
Any interaction that is strong enough to measure some aspect of a system is necessarily strong enough to disrupt some other aspect of the same system. Thus, you can learn nothing about a quantum system without changing something else.
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The spin of an electron is about as quantum mechanical as a system can be, and any attempt to visualize it classically will badly miss the point.
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The dimension of a space can be defined as the maximum number of mutually orthogonal vectors in that space.
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"If you want to know how physicists really think about the world, this book is the place to start."--Sean Carroll, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe

"Susskind and Friedman's persuasive overview--and their insistence on explaining...exactly what it is that is strange about quantum mechanics--may be just what is needed."--Nature

"If you're ever banished to a desert island and allowed to take just one book, here it is. Given enough time, with no distractions, you could use it to eventually master quantum mechanics."--Science News

About the Author

Leonard Susskind is the Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics at Stanford University. He is the author of Quantum Mechanics (with Art Friedman) and The Theoretical Minimum (with George Hrabovsky), among other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Art Friedman is a data consultant who previously spent fifteen years at Hewlett-Packard as a software engineer. A lifelong student of physics, he lives in Mountain View, California.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00IFTT8GA
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; 1st edition (25 February 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7893 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 202,958 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 9 in Mechanics Physics
- 9 in Physics of Mechanics (Kindle Store)
- 59 in Quantum Theory (Kindle Store)

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About the authors

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Leonard Susskind
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Leonard Susskind (born June, 1940) is the Felix Bloch professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Acmedogs (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Art Friedman
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Art Friedman is a lifelong student of physics. His career encompasses software engineering, teaching, and writing. He spent fifteen years as a compiler developer for Hewlett Packard, and currently works independently as a data consultant for California schools. When he's not helping clients or puzzling over quantum entanglement, Art plays the fiddle. More often than not, people get up to dance.
Art was born in the Bronx and spent the first half of his life in New York. He has degrees in physics, teaching, and computer science. Art lives with his wife, Maggie, in Murphys, CA.
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Amazon Customer

Well explained book. And it arrived on time.

Reviewed in Australia on 6 September 2019

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Great book, very informative.

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Larry

Excellent overview of Quantum Mechanics

Reviewed in Australia on 15 February 2021

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I bought this book looking for an easy read on Quantum Mechanics, hoping to gain a fresh perspective on the topic. The book was not disappointing in this pursuit.

I appreciate the way Susskind introduces Quantum Mechanics as an alternative system of logic, though he fails to come back to that point and really explain in a more rigorous way what he means by this. I think he was right to start with spin as the quintessential quantum system and only introduce wavefunctions later.

I found Susskind's notation involving the wavefunction irritating. He himself says how wonderful Dirac notation is, then promptly ditches it to write things in terms of wavefunctions instead. Why? Why go to all the trouble of showing the reader the better system of things, coordinate-free in Dirac notation, only to take it away? This isn't just a nitpick-- the equations are significantly more difficult to understand when they are written in particular coordinates and I frequently had to translate them to Dirac notation in my head.

An important insight that this book offered me was the point of view that a quantum system is something that lives in an abstract vector space with less basis states than we are used to. In classical physics, we imagine everything as either a scalar field or a 3-vector field (or a 4-vector field if time is included). But one of the big features about Quantum mechanics is that there are systems which have degrees of freedom which don't fit in either of these two categories. Particularly, the spin of a particle is a property with only two basis states! This is totally foreign to a classically trained mind. I'm glad this point was emphasised (maybe not as much as it should have been), as I feel it reaches the heart of what makes Quantum physics different.

Unfortunately Susskind does not properly motivate how the quantum equations come about from the classical, or vice versa. He makes an attempt, describing how the expectation values of quantum observables evolve according to the classical equations. He also draws a correspondence between Poisson brackets and Commutator relations. But he does not explain what the actual correspondence is on a mathematical level-- like every other author/professor I have heard, they point to the *visual* similarity, as if that means anything at all. I am vaguely aware that there is in fact a deep mathematical connection, though I suppose I will have to do more reading of hard textbooks to find out about that.

Oddly, Susskind omits any mention of the Heisenberg picture (where kets are static and operators evolve in time). The Heisenberg picture is advantageous in understanding the evolution of observables. I don't think Susskind ever explicitly says that if the expectations of ALL observables evolve in a particular way, then it follows as a consequence that (basically) the entire observable is evolving in the same way. Not just *average* values. The Heisenberg picture brings this fact into sharp focus, and it would be instructive to include it. In fact, the Heisenberg picture is definitely part of the "theoretical minimum".

Another strange omission is any mention of *decoherence*, which is incredibly important in understanding the nature of quantum measurement. When a measurement is made on a quantum system, that system is being decohered with respect to a particular basis; that basis is related to the way the system and the measurement apparatus entangle. Susskind dances around this issue a bit, but why not tackle it head on? He introduces all the mathematics necessary to understand it... and it's a pretty important part of Quantum Mechanics.

The section toward the end about the creation and annihilation operators was also disappointing. Like other professors I have spoken to, he was unable to actually explain what advantage it offers to switch to the annihilation and creation operator picture, or what would motivate a person to choose this way of looking at things without foresight toward Quantum Field Theory. Susskind also fails to prove that the energy levels of a quantum harmonic oscillator form a discrete ladder. He shows that it *contains* a discrete ladder of energy levels but he does not show that the ladder obtained contains *all* energy levels. Again, another classic mistake that professors make. It makes me wonder whether he is regurgitating content he was taught long ago, that he does not really understand himself.

Overall it was an OK book, as someone who basically knew the content already but wanted a refresher and a new perspective. I am still waiting for a book that actually answers some of the questions I posed above, especially regarding (1) why the creation and annihilation operators are introduced, (2) what the mathematical relationship is between Poisson brackets and commutators, and (3) how all of Quantum Mechanics was actually figured out in the first place.

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lachlan

Good book, delivered damaged

Reviewed in Australia on 14 June 2023

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The book is excellent but there was damage to the spine on the copy I received from where a sticker was partially removed, taking part of the cover itself too.

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John Gale

351 pages of clearly explained basic concepts of quantum mechanics

Reviewed in Australia on 18 May 2021

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Wow! I thought I was swimming in treacle before I read this Penguin paperback. Quantum mechanics is not for the faint-hearted yet Professor Susskind with Art Friedman have patiently laid out all the basic concepts with a logical thoroughness laced with good humour. I would add that you need a decent mathematical understanding to follow all the expositions. Be prepared to be entangled with this practical toolkit.

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Tomtom

Physical book is low quality

Reviewed in Australia on 7 October 2020

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Reviewing about the physical book: low paper quality with greyish tint, making the fonts blurry and hard on the eyes

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Trantor

Bien

Reviewed in Mexico on 19 November 2023

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El gramaje del papel es bajo, la portada es delgada, creo que podria mejorarse la calidad un poco en cuanto al material, la calidad de impresión es buena y por el tamaño de letra es facil de leer, tuve mala suerte y no venia emplayado entonces llego con manchas de suciedad por la manipulación que le dieron

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LM

The best Quantum Mechanics "seeder" book

Reviewed in Brazil on 17 July 2023

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The book begins with simple and accessible language and increases in difficulty according to the theme, without ever losing clarity. In it, many scholars find new themes of mathematics and physics to be studied. The book together with the course that Professor Leonard Susskind and Stanford University make available for free on YouTube (in English) is enough to begin to understand the immensity of this theme that is applied to everything we use in our day to day, both in electronics as in medicine. Anyone who thinks that Quantum Mechanics is only theoretical is wrong. So, don't think twice, buy the book and watch the 10 classes of 2 hours each on YouTube for free and start understanding more advanced books on the subject.

PK Singh

Perfect if want to start from scratch with no prerequisite

Reviewed in India on 11 September 2023

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I have been reading the book for quite a while now and totally impressed at how fluently the ideas are conveyed. It feels as if you are on journey along with the author while exploring the forest of quantum world. Totally worth giving a try. I am excited for the special and general relativity parts. Will order them once I finish this one

2 people found this helpful

louis Corsi

très bien

Reviewed in France on 6 July 2023

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très bien

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Cliente Amazon

Introducción a la mecánica cuántica

Reviewed in Spain on 3 July 2023

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Una excelente y peculiar introducción a la mecánica cuántica, con la participación de Leonard Susskind, uno de los padres de la teoría de cuerdas.
El texto es relativamente sencillo, pero riguroso. Hay que tener en cuenta de que libro va dirigido a personas que tengan una cierta formación científica-matemática. Yo diría como mínimo un estudiante de ciencias (física, química, matemáticas) de 2º curso.
Se necesita también cierto nivel de inglés. Aunque este libro está traducido, yo la que tengo es la versión en el idioma original. Desconozco si la versión traducida al castellano es buena o no.
Las lecciones vienen con bastantes ejercicios, que no vienen resueltos en el libro, aunque hay un página web con las soluciones donde se pueden comprobar los resultados. No recuerdo la dirección de la página ahora, pero no es difícil encontrar.

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Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum (Theoretical Minimum 2) Kindle Edition

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